This morning we got some new potting soil (Texas soil here is all clay and gunk, you can't grow anything in it; I use containers exclusively) and a couple new tomato plants and AngryDandelion and I got to work on the garden!

We cleaned out the containers from last year. In the process I moved the mint, which has survived all and only grown stronger, to its own container.

I wanted to buy lavender but it's like $8 a plant (which might be good, idk, but I had a budget) and I still need a container to put it in, since the mint will strangle anything else in with it.

However after much work, we now have six big grow boxes ready and planted! Also these pix probably look dark, because it's been overcast all day. Which was fine. It was already muggy and humid so the sweat was literally streaming off AD and I, and in this case I do mean literally. If it had been sunny we would've been worse, plus sunburn, because no way sunscreen could've stayed on us with all that sweating.

Okay so! Here are the 6 boxes. I have enough soil left to do at least one more box, but this was as far as we got today. AD was def dehydrated by the end and needed a big Gatorade and some salt.

In the "back" are the two tomato plants I bought. One is Cherokee... something. Oops. Heh. The other one is a Better Boy hybrid. No cherry tomatoes this year. These look good and healthy tho.

In the middle are a basil plant; and in that container are 4 butternut(?) squashes I saved from the alley. I'd hoped for more, but at least I saved 4, right? (In case you came in late: there were more, but someone MOWED THEM D: and wiped a lot of them out) The next middle one has some mystery seeds that I think are probably watermelon of some kind. Let's find out!

Then in the "front" are two types of sweet corn (maize). I still have a lot of last year's corn seeds left. I could plant those too I guess... Anyway, anything that doesn't "take" - the watermelon or squash, mostly - I have lots of other seeds from previous years to try and see what sprouts.

In the waterfall we need to replace the pentas. The hummers and butterflies love those, but they got killed in the unusually cold freezes we had in January, and still need replacing.

Moving on - here is my lemon bush. Yeah, technically a tree but as you can see it's pretty bushy. But!! This year it's finally starting to grow upward. We had some of the pine branches cut back last summer (on the left, out of frame) to allow more sun and also to keep the varmints away from the roof. It seems to be paying off.

As you can see, there are lots of nice blooms on the lemon, and the yard smells so good ^_^ We're hoping this is one of the good years. Most citrus has an "every other year" cycle of good fruit production. Last year was small. Also Mom fertilized it this spring!

And here is a happy bumblebee in a lemon blossom! :D Also you can see the pollen dots on the leaves. STILL SO MUCH PINE POLLEN.

Yeah, but by June/July it's too hot for most things to grow, even if you can keep them watered :P

Also it's v hard to grow fruit trees here, other than citrus. Apples and stone fruits require a few hundred chill hours from wintertime and we just don't get those - even the freezes we had were fairly short term. There are a few varieties for southern climates, but overall we just can't get nice homegrown northern fruits without importing them from other states.

I've been wondering about the possibility of growing peach and nectarine trees in a northern European climate. x) I've saved up a lot of pits, along with date palm seeds, to try growing in pots. No, I don't really expect to get fruits, just some unusual potted plants. :)

You probably could, as container plants - lemons can certainly be done. Sometimes I want one of those "multi-citrus" plants where they've grafted a bunch of different citrus onto one rootstock. You can do that with any grafted fruit, like stone fruits.

There's a local garden center that has mini orange and lemon trees for sale. They're purely decorative, though, as the fruits are tiny and sour. I could buy one, of course, but the idea of experimenting with growing my own plants intrigues me.